AN: They really need
a mindfuck genre on this site. Either that, or I need to stop writing them. Um.
Hints of Kakashi/Rin, btw. And Kakashi Gaiden spoilers. I'm…unsatisfied with
this fic. Gah. Much thanks to the wonderful Kimi no
Vanilla, who inspired and helped me with the damnable thing. Hugs to you, dearling!

-

Kakashi doesn't
visit Rin every day, because Rin isn't dead. It's always been easier to measure
fallen soldiers by their virtues instead of their faults, but Rin is twenty-two,
locked in a room, far from faultless and very far from dead.

When he
remembers Obito, Kakashi doesn't remember that he was always late or that he
was always annoying or that he was never good enough. Kakashi remembers smiles
and sunshine, and the best friend anyone could ever have, dying in darkness-dying
for him- and that's the only thing
that matters or ever could matter.

He does it
because he wants to be remembered the same way. Not by the lives he's taken but
by the one's he's saved. He finds it only faintly ironic that the numbers don't
balance out quite the way he wants them to.

He couldn't save
Rin. He tried, in the beginning, and it was probably more his fault than anyone's
that she's where she is today. So he forces himself to go, forces himself to
look at her and to know that he could
and should have done more to save her.

For the first
few years, he went to see her every day, just before he'd stop and visit the
monument, because his rational side argued with his irrational side that
because she was still alive, she took precedence. And then he started going
once every three days, instead, because she'd tried to claw his eyes out that
one time and he'd almost wanted to let her and…

Now he goes once
a month. Sometimes. When he's not away on missions, and the fact that he wants
to accept the ones that keep him away for long periods of time isn't helping
him any. His conscience nestles on his shoulder, smug and satisfied, red eyes
dusted with contempt and Kakashi hates himself a little, or maybe more than a
little, because his relief outweighs his shame.

They make him
sign a form every time he visits her, a form that states that he won't hold the
ward responsible for any injuries that the patient manages to inflict on him.
His signature is done automatically, and he has to laugh at the fact that they
think he'd actually care if she hurt
him or not. Surely what he's done to her is ten times worse than anything she
could return…

She'd given him
her love, and he'd given her a life of pain.

It's a bad
trade.

He takes his
hitai-ate off, because it's all about the subtle nuances with Rin, and he takes
a deep breath and he releases the seals on her door and he enters, leans
against the wall and doesn't stare too much at what she's managed to do to
herself now. Nothing really surprises him these days.

Rin smiles at
him, for once. Smiles and holds her arms out like she wants to be picked up and
held like a child, and he won't –won't- look
at the gnarled, twisted remnant of her left hand, broken and shattered so she
could never again perform her jutsu. The scars are still in all the right
places, and there are some new ones he doesn't recognize, particularly that one
across the bridge of her nose, the inelegant scrawl of a skeletal phantom that
exists only in her mind.

"Hello," Rin
says cheerfully. She talks strangely because she's missing some teeth on the
right side of her jaw. "You're dead."

Kakashi snorts
at that, and sits carefully across the room from her, legs crossed and arms
resting on his knees. She looks annoyed that he's thwarted her, and she lowers
her arms slowly, because maybe those crisscross scars still cause her pain. She
studies him with her one functional eye, and the muscles in the empty socket of
the other one twitch accordingly. He breathes, because it's easier than
screaming.

"I just wanted a
hug…" she murmurs. "Just one. There's nobody here at all. Kakashi doesn't love
me any more, did you know?"

"What are you talking
about…?" he controls his flinch, forces himself to speak and is glad, not for
the first time, of his mask. It does more than hide his smiles, and he's biting
his lip hard enough to bleed. "Of course he does."

"I don't think
he ever did, Obito. I think he was just lying to me. He was always so cold to
me…and…and then, when you died…" Rin trails off desolately and sniffles and
goes back to what she'd been doing when he walked in. She's gouging at her arm
with her mostly-undamaged hand, and the blood is running rivulets down to her
twisted fingertips, dripping on the porcelain-white floors with barely-audible little
plips.

His sharingan
eye burns with tears, and he doesn't wipe them away. Let his dead best friend
mourn in his own way. It's only fair, after all.

"You shouldn't
do that," he tells her carefully. It's never helped in the past, never made her
stop, but at least it's something to do and something to say and even if it
means nothing to either of them, it's better than keeping silent. Because
silence scars deeper than words. Or so he's found, anyways.

"What's it like?"
she asks, not looking up at him. He knows he should stop her, but…he can't. It's more painful to watch. And
even though it's immoral, what's one more bad decision in a life of wrong
turns, lost chances and a cacophony of regret?

"Hm?"

"Being dead, and
all," she says in the same practical, no-nonsense voice that she used to use
when she was a medic. Kakashi wonders if the balance of lives lost versus lives
saved is less skewed for Rin. Probably. She was just as good at her job as he
was at his. She keeps digging into her flesh, making little 'tch, tch' noises
every so often, like it hurts but she doesn't know how to stop. Like there's a
monster under her skin and she's trying to claw it out with her bare hands.

There's a
monster in everyone. Some people are just better at being oblivious to its
presence.

"It's not so
bad," he whispers. The tears from Obito's eye slide down what little of his
cheek is exposed and are absorbed in the resilient fabric of his mask.
Absorption, assimilation, it's what happens to all of them eventually, isn't
it? And so Kakashi doesn't think of it as crying, because that's not what he
came here to do.

"Do you see
Kakashi any more? Or I am the only one you visit?" She lifts her head, plays
her bloodied fingers up her arm to her cheek, and then across her lips. Her
tongue flicks out to catch the sanguine droplets, and he looks away. Can't
watch and knows he has to. It's a peculiar sort of penance.

"Sometimes," he
allows, leaves out the every time I look
in a mirror… and decides that if she's seeing him as Obito today, then he'll
let her. It's better than when she knows who he really is, because when that
happens…

"I miss him,"
she tells him, like it's a secret, like she'd never told anyone before in her
life, but she tells him all the time, and it's never gotten easier to hear. "I
called for him. I thought he'd save me. I thought that because I loved him, he'd
come."

"He wanted to."
And his throat constricts and his vision blurs and he can't see straight or think straight and he knows he's going to have to go home and get
spectacularly drunk because he doesn't want to remember this, even though he
knows that alcohol is a piss-poor anesthesia and if he wants to forget
everything he's seen, a kunai to the heart would be a far better option.

But that'd be
cheating.

"Well that doesn't
matter, does it…?" She lifts one arm over her head and it makes a singularly
disgusting grating noise, the sort that happens when you force a joint in
directions for which it was never manufactured. She doesn't seem to notice, and
her single eye stares into nothingness. "Life should have been perfect. And
then you died, and you loved me, didn't you? I'm sorry I didn't love you back.
I thought that Kakashi…that he was everything I'd ever wanted but then he left me and I hate him and !"

She pauses. And
slowly, slowly, her eye turns back to him, re-focuses and sharpens, and then
her expression changes in an instant from carefree and whimsical to deadly and
dangerous and she lunges at him,
hissing and snarling like a mountain cat, and he can only just catch her wrists
in time to keep her from killing him.

"You!" she spits
the word like a curse. "I told you never
to come back here!"

He flinches
again and transfers both her small, emaciated wrists to one hand, and she's
fighting him still but six years of inactivity have done nothing for her strength,
and with his now-free hand, he takes his mask off. Let her see the monster in me, he thinks.

She's crying
now. Great, bitter, wracking sobs that shake her whole body and set her
shoulders to trembling and he pulls her into a sort of half-hug, seeing as how
he's still gotta watch out for her hands, and she lets herself be held, for
once. She buries her face against the crook of his neck and would probably sob
her heart out, if she had one to give. "Hateyouhateyouhateyouhateyou,"
she chants like a mantra, but she's letting
herself be held, and he thinks, just briefly, that maybe it's an
improvement.

"You left me to
die!"

"I'm sorry…"

"I trusted you!"

"I'm sorry…"

"You should have
died for me!"

Yes, he acknowledges briefly, bitterly. I should have. I would have, if I had it to
do over again…

But Rin doesn't
care about that. She doesn't care about any of that. She would have forgiven
him once, but everyone has their faults, after all, and who is he to hold her
in contempt for something he can't do either?

They say that
ninjas aren't supposed to cry. That they are, in essence, emotionless killing
machines. He's not emotionless yet, but he's headed that way fast. Maybe these
visits are doing him more good than he'd thought.

Forgive me, he thinks but doesn't say,
because he doesn't deserve it, and because she doesn't care. And so he holds
her against him until she stops moving, and he wonders when he'd gotten so
proficient at killing his best friends.

Kakashi doesn't
visit Rin any more, because he doesn't need to. She haunts him regardless.

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